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Monday, September 22, 2014

Suchetana Chattopadhyay

Introduction

What were the local
radical anti-colonial actions of Sikh migrants during and after the First World
War? In Bengal, the operation of the colonial repressive state apparatus to
deal with the passengers of the Komagata Maru and Punjabi migrants influenced
the intersections of anti-colonial strands in Calcutta during 1914-15 and
shaped the organised transmission of the ship’s memory as a symbol of
resistance among the Sikh workers in the industrial centres of South-West
Bengal from the 1920s onwards. In the process, certain neglected aspects of the
last stretch of the ship’s journey and its immediate and long-term local effect
are unraveled.

Monday, September 15, 2014

Arindam Banerjee

A book review of ‘Keynesian
Reflections: Effective Demand, Money, Finance and Policies in the Crisis’
edited by Toshiaki Hirai, Maria Marcuzzo and Perry Mehrling, Oxford University
Press 2013.

The global financial crisis of 2008 has dealt a double blow
at the fundamentals of the world economic system, which the latter is still
grappling with. The first blow was to the hitherto unchallenged hegemony of
international finance capital, which rose to global dominance over the
preceding three decades. The collapse of Lehmann Brothers and with it the disappearing
aura of the Wall Street brought into question the deep-rooted confidence of
finance capital. However, in the aftermath of the crisis, one can say that
though Finance Capital is down but not yet out, given that there is an intense
ongoing effort on part of the global financial elites to reinstate the
near-complete hegemony that it enjoyed till the 2008 crash. The ardent push for
austerity in the Euro zone and the more recent militancy of the Republicans,
blocking the US budget, in order to bargain for greater fiscal conservatism,
are cases in point, which reflect this continuous effort of finance capital to
influence policy-making.

Monday, September 8, 2014

If Bipan Chandra – the Marxist, Nationalist, Gandhian, Liberal, all
rolled into one – did not exist, he would have to be invented. His life, both
as a teacher and historian, is so crucial for us to have a sense of our current
accomplishments and predicaments. His life is a parable of five decades of
historical thoughts on modern India. However as luck would have it, Bipan
Chandra did exist, in flesh and blood, till 30 August 2014 at any rate. So
there is no need to invent him. All that needs to be done is to tell his story,
a brief intellectual biography.

Monday, September 1, 2014

Satyaki
Roy

Class
has been a powerful analytical category in explaining social dynamics. In
pre-classical ideas, class was identified in describing historical facts and
normative positions. It is the advent of classical theory with Smith and
Ricardo that made class an objective category in explaining distributions and
tensions independent of technological and natural characteristics. But it is
only in Marx that besides being mere distributional categories, class as a
concept becomes alive assuming the place of both the subject and object of
history.

Editorial

How do we see the world? It is neither a gaze, nor is it to invent the predetermined truth, it is to intervene from a position. Our seeing is changing at the same time and without any claim to excavate the unadulterated truth that never existed.
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